It seems that nearly all computer monitors have now switched from a
4:3 aspect ratio popular several years ago to a "wide screen"
16:10 and now mostly to an even wider 16:9.

But screen sizes are usually measured by their diagonal length and
those sizes have not changed. For example, before I had my Thinkpad
X201, I had a X60 and a X35. They are similar laptops in the same
product line with 12.1" screens. But 12.1" describes the size along
the diagonal and the aspect ratio switched from 4:3 to 16:10 between
the X60 and the X201. As the screen stretched out but maintained the
same diagonal length, the area shrunk: from 453 square centimeters
to 425.

But screens are not only getting smaller, they are also getting less
useful. The switch to wider aspect ratios is done so that people can
watch wide screen movies while using a larger proportion of their
screens. Of course, the vast majority of people's time on their
laptops is not spent watching wide screen movies but in programs like
browsers, word processors, and editors. Because most of our writing
systems lay out documents from top to bottom, the tools we most
frequently use to display (and then scroll through) the things we read
primarily use vertical screen space -- the dimension that is
shrinking.

If you have a desktop monitor, you might rotate the whole thing 90
degrees and "solve" the problem. If you're on a laptop though (as I
usually am) this is clearly not an option.

I am not the first person to be annoyed by this trend. In fact, many
recent desktop UI changes are designed to work around this issue. In
the free software world, both Unity and GNOME 3 have made
efforts to hide, merge, or otherwise get ride of title bars, menu
bars, and panels that take up dwindling vertical space. I use
Awesome which I've mostly set up to do two side-by-side terminals
with very little in the way of menu bars.

Applications are the worst offenders and the solutions for those
things that won't run in a terminal (or people that don't want to live
there) are still lacking. I have been using Firefox's Tree Style Tab
extension to move tabs to the side and hand-customized toolbars
that squeeze everything I need (i.e., back, forward, stop, refresh,
and URL bar) onto a single menu bar.

But the situation still drives me crazy. I'd love to hear what others
are doing.